Educational software that tests specific subjects for specific levels of learning is generally known in the art. Tests may serve to reinforce the educational process and/or to provide feedback regarding a student's progress. Terms such as “user”, “child”, “student”, “player”, or “test taker”, as used herein, should be understood to mean any participant in, or user of, educational software or an educational system that tests and/or reinforces and/or provides feedback regarding the user's knowledge in a formal or informal manner.
Although a wide range of software for home and business use exists, educational software is often primarily directed towards grade school aged children. It is believed to be generally desirable that educational software or programs have some entertaining quality in order to maintain a subject's attention. Thus, many educational programs are designed to be both entertaining and provide testing. Educational aspects and tests may be incorporated into game play such that a game has an underlying educational purpose.
Popular examples of commercially available, personal computer (“PC”) based educational software titles include “Math Blaster”, “Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego”, and “Word Munchers”, among many others. Although educational in nature, these software products generally exhibit a significant entertainment component so as to compete with other forms of entertainment or activity. These other forms of entertainment may include video games playable using computing devices such as PC's or video game consoles, television and/or playback of recorded programming using a suitable device such as a Video Cassette Recorder (“VCR”) player or Digital Versatile Disc (“DVD”) player, and/or the use of the global interconnection of computing devices and computer networks, commonly referred to as the Internet.
For many parents and students alike, using educational software at home can prove to be a difficult or undesirable task, as even the best designed educational software title may not be able to effectively compete for a child's attention with these other forms of entertainment. Many current products require that the student be isolated, and that learning be individual and substantially continuous, for example. This may further serve to make the educational product less appealing to a student, and less likely that the educational software will be successful in its goal of education or training. Additionally, parents or supervisors may find it difficult to monitor a student's progress, or to monitor how often educational software that was provided by purchase and installation on a suitable computing device is actually used.
Educational software may provide periodic testing, or more intensive training such as multi-day training sessions, for example. A drawback of such training is the time commitment employees or student must devote to such training sessions. Often, temporally fixed training meetings can be disruptive not just in time consumed, but also in terms of scheduling for an individual employee.
It can be seen from the above that there is a need for an educational method and system which permits a user to effectively compete with outside distractions, provides the administrator of such a product substantial control over how the educational efforts proceed, how questions are asked, when the questions are asked and what type of questions are asked, for example, and for the process to be sufficiently efficient so as not to represent a significant disruption to a user's ordinary course of action or activity.